Archives For Clinical trials

If you are involved in the study start up process, you know how important it is to have the best investigators. Having the best investigators allows you to be successful in enrolling patients. Many have their own investigator database, but when there is difficulty, they usually resort to PubMed, registries, and other data. This data is difficult to navigate and becomes a time suck.

Indicate Investigators has all the data available, but organizes it in a way that is easy to navigate and will save you time.

Below is the launch page to search by Drug/Drug Class OR Disease. We curate all publicly available sources that have data on investigators, mining the data from its native html, text or XML, and loading into structured, linked data on each Investigator. We know what trials they participated in, how many trials, and how frequently they work within specific disease indications.

Once you decide what to search for, you will be directed to the results page of all investigators involved in that indication. Continue Reading…

Sponsor Finder is a tool created to allow our users to search and identify sales opportunities at trial sponsors. Pinpointing opportunities at the right moment can be difficult because once the trial is announced, it is likely that everyone to work with is already lined up. You can utilize the filters in Sponsor Finder, avoid this problem and stay ahead of the curve.

One search that is popular among current users, is to look for organizations that have trials completing in the next 6 months.

I will throw out a specific example: “I am on a team with phase 3, breast cancer trial experience…How do I search?” You would plug the following into Sponsor Finder: phase 1/2 and 2, active, breast cancer trials, that are completing in the next 180 days.Continue Reading…

Today, we take the time to thank and support all clinical research professionals on International Clinical Trials’ Day. Many would think that this day was just picked by some organization to celebrate the success of clinical trials throughout the years. But, in fact May 20th is the date when James Lind started his famous trial on how to treat scurvy. We have come a long way since having a clinical trial to treat scurvy. Lind paved the way for clinical discovery and finding new means of treatment.

One of the main obstacles with clinical trials today is recruitment. Organizations are having a difficult time getting the bodies they need for the trials they are conducting. Continue Reading…

How convenient would it be if you were able to receive karmadata updates and news at a place you navigate to every day? If you use SalesForce.com for CRM, now you can.

With the karmadata/SalesForce integration you are able to link your accounts within SalesForce to the karmadata company entity. Once linked you will receive the same updates as you would in karmadata, but directly within your SalesForce workflow. Below you are able to see an example of an account page on SalesForce when it is linked to karmadata.

By clicking on the links provided in the feed, you will be directed to the source where the record came from. Continue Reading…

I think by now if you are living in or around Boston you have heard of the #IceBucketChallenge to #StrikeoutALS. The Ice Bucket Challenge was created to raise awareness for support of ALS and more specifically Pete Frates. Pete is a former Boston College baseball captain who is battling the disease. If you are nominated to complete the challenge, you must film yourself pouring a bucket of ice water on your head, after nominating others to complete the challenge within 24 hours. By now you have probably seen Pro Athletes, friends, family, and even politicians completing this challenge.

While watching Pete Frates’ video on his site, I learned what rewriting the end of ALS meant to him. “Rewriting the end of ALS means raising money to get better research for treatment and ultimately finding a cure.” So if you head over to karmadata, we can dig into the research part of ALS. You are able to see below that the number of Industry Sponsored ALS trials are declining. As Pete said, the way to a cure is through research. We need to raise the amount of research that is being done.

If you head over to Sponsor Finder and search for ALS Trials, you will see that there are only 8 companies actively conducting ALS clinical trials.

Lastly, this data card below shows government funding. John Hopkins University being the top organization who grants money to ALS.

So what does all this mean? This challenge is to create awareness for ALS and I believe it is working. When I log in to facebook, it’s the first thing I see and it fills my news feed from top to bottom. By creating awareness, we are able to become more knowledgable on ALS and more likely to donate to the cause, which will hopefully result in more research. With all of the visualizations on funding and number of companies/trials, you can see that ALS may not be something people are too aware of. The Challenge will definitely not cure anything right away, but it is a big step in the right direction!

A couple of us here at karmadata have already donated to ALS and completed the Ice Bucket Challenge, even our CEO Sean Power who completed it last night! We urge you to visit petefrates.com and donate! You can also check out the sweet Frate Train gear at petefrates.storenvy.com

Indicate Investigators is an app in the karmadata gallery that was created to search a “disease of interest” and return a list of top Investigators within that disease. Now we have added the option of not only searching by disease but being able to search by drug class.

When you open the Indicate Investigator app, right away you are able to pick either Drug Class or Disease. For example, if you wanted to search for Monoclonal Antibodies (which is popular in treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases), you would pick drug class and then start typing it in as it autocompletes. You are also still able to toggle back and forth between drug class and disease once you are fully in the app.

karmadata enables users to visualize and simply query the world’s healthcare data. So why can’t the excel download sheets be simple to navigate as well? Now they are! The format of the existing download has greatly improved. We have cleared away unnecessary columns and provide only the information that is important to you. We have organized the columns and also added a different tab for clinical trials. Now the user is able to toggle back and forth between a tab for clinical trials, and a tab for sponsors.

This download is clean, simple, and user friendly. Feel free to jump up and down (like we did) when you realize how painless this excel sheet is to navigate through.

At the karmadata HQ the developers have been working diligently to create more filters to expand the abilities that Sponsor Finder has. There have been multiple additions already and we want to share them with you. The first addition that has been made is the visualizations of trial timelines. This gives the user the ability to quickly see a comparison between the actual vs. expected for a trial as well as different events that have occured.

After running a Sponsor Finder search, you will be able to find these visualizations by clicking on the number of trials in the middle of the green circle. This will bring you to the list of clinical trials page. Right away you are able to see the trial timelines right under it’s trial listing.

Some of the events that you would be able to see on the timeline include: original/actual start and end dates, addition of trial sites, when a trial is announced, and enrollment dates. The blue line is the current timeline and grey is the original timeline. This will give our clients the ability to easily see trial delays/events instead of having to dig into the source. In the end, saves you and your team time-which is what Sponsor Finder aims to do! More updates on Sponsor Finder additions to follow.

About KarmaData

karmadata is a collaborative information service. We are creating a new platform for consumers of information to create and share data, visualizations, and knowledge on the web. We believe in individual users, not corporate subscriptions.